Product reviews for The Trainer's Toolkit

Several years ago a high profile learning styles trainer told me that in the near future a plethora of trainings would appear based on the concept of what was then called “whole-brain' learning. She further said that many of them would be superficially attractive and gimmicky with the aim of grabbing attention and promising transformative, quick-fix approaches to training and learning.

Well, she was right. At that time, Alistair Smith was one of the few UK trainers delivering Accelerated Learning courses; certainly published resources were thin on the ground. However, more material is emerging and as it does, it becomes trickier for the customer to sort the chaff from the wheat.

Happily, this book falls into the latter category and indeed identifies the same problem that I have outlined above ; the authors state on page 3 “Since writing this book, we've noticed a kind of bandwagon effect going on amongst facilitators"put some Mozart on the music system, and throw a koosh ball around and voila! ” you have accelerated learning.' I have observed this process going on in schools ” the book describes it as “manicuring a corpse'!

Instead, the process should be about bringing the corpse of tired, unmotivated training and learning back to life. It follows hot on the heels of “The Teacher's Toolkit' and is as I have suggested based on the principles of Accelerated Learning. It is divided into three sections ” an introductory section outlining the principles of “brain-friendly' learning, an overview of the five principles of design a training session, and a large third section of “tools' for facilitating creativity, honouring uniqueness, making training rich and multi-sensory and managing state. The material draws heavily on techniques used in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and presents them in a user-friendly way. I particularly liked the summary at the end of each chapter which demand a reader response ” basically a short test to check whether the material has penetrated, but done in a creative and fun way which personalises what has been learned for the reader.



The book is aimed at trainers new to brain-friendly learning and the authors use a variety of methods to present their approach and involve the reader throughout. It reads at times like a book about child-centred teaching and this is not surprising as it puts the learner at the heart of the process. The third section lists a plethora of ideas, grouped into categories such as “developing your own intelligences' and “-˜dressing the learning environment' for what to do, so many that at times I began to feel a little overwhelmed. The authors' enthusiasm and experience clearly shines through here and the book is such a rich resource that even trainers who are familiar with brain-friendly learning will find much to harvest.